Chart: Zomato Ad Revenues vs Event Ticketing Revenues For FY13

For the Info Edge backed online restaurant and events guide Zomato, the advertising revenues were at Rs 10.89 crore for the financial year ending March 31, 2013 (FY13), up 580.6% from Rs 1.60 crore advertising revenues in FY12. These revenues accounted for 95.7% of Zomato’s total revenues for the fiscal FY13. Note that these revenues also include Zomato’s printed food guide business, which it had launched in April 2012.

The revenue from the sale of event tickets for Zomato was at Rs 0.33 crore for the fiscal, up 22.2% from Rs 0.27 crore revenue in the previous fiscal, while the revenue from restaurant bookings was at Rs 0.15 crore for the fiscal, down 11.76% from Rs 0.17 crore revenues in the previous fiscal.

Event ticketing accounted for 2.9% of Zomato’s total revenues for FY13, while restaurant booking accounted for 1.32% of Zomato’s total revenues for FY13.

The restaurant booking revenues is quite strange since Zomato doesn’t publicly offer a restaurant booking service, however the company told Medianama that it has a pay per lead model with restaurants, through which restaurants pay Zomato for every conversion or any food delivery order. Note that Zomato offers a custom phone number for select restaurants through which it claims to connect consumers to a non-busy phone at the restaurant.

Last month, Zomato had reported revenues of Rs 11.38 crore for FY13, up 457.84% from Rs 2.04 crore revenue in FY12. The company had posted an EBITDA loss of Rs 10.03 crore for FY13, up 38.92% from Rs 7.22 crore loss in FY12.

Zomato had informed that it had broke even at an EBITDA level in the Indian market during the quarter ending December 2012, and in Dubai the following quarter. What is probably leading to an increase in EBITDA losses is its aggressive International rollout.

Zomato’s Expansion Spree: Zomato had expanded to South Africa by launching a site for Johannesburg in April 2013 and it looks like the company is launching a site for Cape Town next month. It also seems to be expanding operations in the United Kingdom by launching sites for Manchester and Birmingham next month as indicated by Zomato’s website. Besides this, the company has operations in Sri Lanka, UAE, Qatar, and Philippines.

It also plans to launch in Thailand and developed markets like Canada, United States and Australia. Zomato had launched in Singapore last year, however it had pulled out few months later, since restaurants were not willing to share menus, and it was taking a lot of time to collect data compared to other markets. Earlier this year, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal had told Medianama that each of these foreign operations will take a minimum two to three years to generate decent revenue to the company.

On the India front, Zomato offers listings for 13 Indian cities including Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, and Pune among others and was planning to add Guwahati and Cochin in the following months.